<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Cultural Imperatives by AliceInKinkland</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25158199">Cultural Imperatives</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInKinkland/pseuds/AliceInKinkland'>AliceInKinkland</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Battlestar Galactica (2003)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Battlestar Pegasus aka the bad vibes ship, Betrayal, Character Study, Dehumanization, F/F, Guns, Humiliation, Hurt No Comfort, Religion, Sexual Violence, Torture</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:22:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,399</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25158199</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInKinkland/pseuds/AliceInKinkland</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is a weakness of Cain’s: even as she stands here, litanying to herself the things the Cylons have done, she cannot stop herself from seeing Gina as a human woman. She desires her because of it. She pities her because of it.</p><p>This is why she has come: to force herself to see Gina as the object she is.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Helena Cain/Gina Inviere</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Cultural Imperatives</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The first time Gina is interrogated, Helena Cain does not watch.</p><p>She is not ready to admit to herself how personal her interest in Gina’s humiliation really is. She tells herself this is about intelligence gathering, wartime tactics. Degradation, violation, is a means to an end, nothing more.</p><p>She goes to her quarters. She forces herself through a circuit of pushups, situps, lateral twists. Again. Gina’s body is a ghost in her bed, in her chair, perched on her table. Cain’s fingers remember the feeling of touching her—of touching that <em>thing</em>, that traitorous machine. She claps her hands between each pushup until the feeling dissipates.</p><p>Gina’s lips were soft. She would bite her bottom lip with perfect teeth, and Cain would kiss that beautiful mouth.</p><p>She hopes that bottom lip is split now, cracked and bleeding. She hopes that mouth is begging, pleading for a mercy that will never come. She hopes it is being forced open, spat into, stuffed full with unwanted cock until its owner chokes and splutters and passes out.</p><p>She shivers, a full-body wave of anger and desire. Well. Perhaps her interest in all this is not so blandly strategic, after all.</p>
<hr/><p>In the still moments, the Six known as Gina talks to God.</p><p>She does not ask Him why. She knows she will, eventually. There is only so much one body can take before one’s faith must metamorphosize, becoming doubt or martyrdom or some other twisted thing. For Gina, it is already becoming a sick love that she can feel lodged behind her collarbone, a truth she cannot swallow.</p><p>But for now, all she does when she talks to Him is tell Him stories. She tells Him about the ship and the crew. She tells Him about her plans for after her death and resurrection. She tells Him about all the places she has been. She closes her eyes.</p><p>Sometimes, she sleeps.</p>
<hr/><p>Cain opens the door to the interrogation room and steps inside. The interrogator is inside with Gina. His boot is pressed against the back of her neck. Her dress has ridden up, revealing the curve of her ass. She is crying, and blinking it away.</p><p>Here is a weakness of Cain’s: even as she stands here, litanying to herself the things the Cylons have done, she cannot stop herself from seeing Gina as a human woman. She desires her because of it. She pities her because of it.</p><p>This is why she has come: to force herself to see Gina as the object she is.</p>
<hr/><p>The interrogator asks Gina things. Some of them are things she knows, like how the Cylon baseships are constructed. Some are things she does not know, like where those baseships are now.</p><p>Gina tries lying, but the interrogator doesn’t believe her. She tries telling truths—small truths, and then larger ones—but he does not believe these, either. No matter what she says, he hits her, and he fracks her, and he smears his ejaculate on her breasts, and he tells her about how alone she is, how her people have abandoned her, left her to suffer. It is very human, this haphazard, gleeful cruelty. It is not very sophisticated, or targeted, or efficient. This does not make it any less painful, any less shame-slick.</p><p>“I bet you wish you could kill yourself, huh?” he says, hand wrapped around her throat. Tighter, tighter, until Gina feels a pop behind her eyes. “Wake up in a shiny new body and put this all behind you? Well, unlucky for you, I know how to keep you alive for a long, long time.”</p><p>Outside of the cell, Cain is watching. Gina locks eyes with her. Cain holds her gaze, expressionless.</p>
<hr/><p>“Give me some time alone with this thing.”</p><p>Cain steps into the cell, dismissing the interrogator with a wave of her hand. He salutes and complies, making a quick retreat. Cain knows he will probably be watching her from the guard room, along with the soldiers stationed there. That’s good. They will see she has no residual feelings for the robot that warmed her bed for the past six months.</p><p>“Hello, Helena,” says Gina, and she smirks as though she has just told a joke. She makes to get to her feet.</p><p>Cain slaps her in the face. The sound is loud in the small room. Gina wavers, almost falling down, and sinks back into an awkward kneel, her arms cuffed tightly behind her back.</p><p>“Who did you communicate with, when you were on this ship? What were your orders? What is the name of your commanding officer?”</p><p>Gina frowns. “We don’t work like that,” she says. “We’re not humans. Our society is more horizontal. Collaborative.”</p><p>She sounds like she used to when the two of them would lay in bed together, a tangle of sheets and limbs. Good natured arguments as pillow talk. It’s a mockery. It’s disrespectful.</p><p>It’s so, so tempting, so comforting, so <em>nice</em>.</p><p>Cain pushes Gina onto her back on the hard floor of the cell. She places one knee against Gina’s stomach, pressing down until Gina coughs and sputters. She pulls out her sidearm.</p><p>Gina relaxes in her grip, and Cain laughs, bitter, cold.</p><p>“You think I’m going to shoot you with this? You think I’m going to let you get out of here that easily?”</p><p>With her free hand, Cain parts Gina’s legs. Her inner thighs are coated in pink-tinged slick, a large enough quantity that Cain thinks, with queasy approval, that the interrogator must have invited some others to join him. Smart. That’ll be good for crew morale.</p><p>Cain brings her gun to the bruised, raw opening of Gina’s battered cunt. She pushes it in in one quick thrust. Gina tenses, but she does not scream. She just closes her eyes and lies still.</p>
<hr/><p>Cain used to be utterly silent during sex, so quiet that Gina would sometimes look up from between Cain’s spread legs to see if something was wrong. There Gina would be, fingers buried deep, lips smeared with the sweet salt of the Admiral’s desire, peering into Cain’s face, looking for a sign.</p><p>Gina has spent a lot of her life looking for signs, and this is where it has gotten her.</p><p>“Are you alright?” Gina asked the first few times Cain went silent like this, when she had just started inviting Gina back to her quarters.</p><p>Each time, Cain opened her eyes and smiled the smile of a big cat, a lazy predator. The danger and beauty of it made Gina’s cunt pulse with need. Cain never spoke in those moments, just smiled that smile and nodded and nudged Gina’s head back down.</p><p>Once, only once, Gina caught a glimpse of Cain’s face at the moment of orgasm, her face scrunched up, naked in the totality of her want. Gina has never felt closer to God than she did in this moment.</p>
<hr/><p>Cain makes Gina clean off the gun with her mouth after she fracks her with it. Gina’s precise tongue, her erstwhile-confident lips, licking, swallowing, seem like an inevitability to Cain. She does not often feel this way, does not believe in destiny, but right now, she feels a kind of cosmic rightness to her every motion. This is the only way any of this could go, considering how the whole world has gone wrong, and the parts she and Gina have played in it all.</p><p>Cain pulls the gun from Gina’s mouth. She could hit her with it, slam it against her traitorous Cylon skull, but she does not. She tucks it into its holster. She will clean it properly later. She signals to the guards to open the door to the cell.</p><p>She has taken less pleasure in this whole thing than she expected.</p>
<hr/><p>Gina tastes blood and semen, metal and oil. The gun is cold against her tongue.</p><p>In her mind, she projects: other places, other possibilities. Anywhere but here. Anytime but now.</p><p>There were so many other ways things could have gone for her and for Cain, so many decision points. Some things are fixed, Gina knows: God has a plan for the universe, and for His children. But there is nothing about this moment—Gina’s bruised throat, Cain’s hand painfully tight in her hair, the bald hatred on her face—that had to happen this way. Nothing happening here that really matters.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>